Projecting marine plankton responses to climate change using realized niches

海洋浮游植物是一种单细胞的微型光合生物，分布于世界海洋上层100米处。总的来说，它们负责地球上所有光合作用总量的一半左右，并为整个海洋食物网提供资源。光合作用将无机碳转化为有机碳，由于一些有机碳沉入深海，浮游植物在从大气中清除二氧化碳方面发挥着积极作用。微型和中型浮游动物是介导营养转移和向深海输出光合碳的主要生物。在下一个世纪，海洋中的许多条件将发生变化，包括温度、表面风速、混合层的深度以及浮游植物生长所需的营养资源的分布。因此，预计浮游生物生产力的变化将对海洋食物网和碳的地球化学循环产生影响。目前对浮游生物生理学和生态学的了解不足以对预期的变化作出可信的预测。 我将使用浮游生物存在和丰度的空间和时间调查，以及温度，盐度，资源的可用性等环境数据，以及海洋表面的混合，以产生描述浮游植物和浮游动物物种的有利条件的模型。这些模型既可用来描述有利于每一物种的生境的特征，也可用来预测每一物种出现的时间和地点。（1）填补我们对当代海洋非常稀疏的采样的空白，并绘制更详细的浮游生物地理学和季节性地图，（2）预测未来海洋浮游生物地理学的变化，以未来海洋条件的模式为指导，以及（3）研究这些物种分布模式在多大程度上是恒定的，或可能随着时间的推移而改变，对于生态上重要的浮游植物和浮游动物物种。 该项目的工作将增加我们对海洋食物网基础的了解，帮助我们发展关于未来世纪浮游植物和浮游动物分布变化的详细假设，并将指导复杂三维海洋模型的开发者改进这些模型中浮游生物的表示。

Marine phytoplankton are unicellular, microscopic photosynthetic organisms found throughout the upper 100 m of the world's oceans. In aggregate they are responsible for about half of the total of all photosynthesis on Earth and provide the resources for the entire marine food web. Photosynthesis converts inorganic carbon to organic carbon and since some of the organic carbon sinks into the deep ocean, phytoplankton play an active role in removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Micro- and mesozooplankton are the primary organisms which mediate both trophic transfer and export of photosynthetic carbon to the deep sea. Many conditions in the oceans will change over the next century including temperature, surface wind speeds, the depth of the mixed layer, and the distribution of nutrient resources required by phytoplankton to grow. Thus changes in the productivity of plankton are expected with consequences for the marine food web and the biogeochemical cycling of carbon. Current knowledge of plankton physiology and ecology is insufficient to make credible projections of the anticipated changes. I will use spatial and temporal surveys of plankton presence and abundance, together with environmental data such as temperature, salinity, the availability of resources, and mixing of the surface ocean to produce models describing the conditions favourable to each of dozens of phytoplankton and zooplankton species. These models can be used to both characterize the habitats favourable to each species and to project when and where each species will be found. These models can be used in several ways: (1) to fill in gaps in our very sparse sampling of the contemporary ocean and develop more detailed maps of plankton biogeography and seasonality, (2) to make projections of changes in the biogeography of plankton in the future ocean, guided by models of future ocean conditions, and (3) to study the extent these species distribution models are constant or are likely to change over time, for ecologically important phytoplankton and zooplankton species. The work in this project will increase our knowledge of the base of the marine food web, help develop detailed hypotheses for changes in phytoplankton and zooplankton distributions over the coming century, and will guide developers of complex 3d ocean models as they improve the representation of plankton in these models.